Rio's ace up its sleeve : Education in Brazil, The Economist

Sep 1st 2011| RIO DE JANEIRO

MY RECENT post on our Schumpeter blog compared the relative merits and demerits of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro from the perspective of businesses deciding where to set up in Brazil. Rio has another advantage over São Paulo, and one that may be decisive in the long run: its schools. In the past year I have visited schools in both cities, and Rio’s won hands down. One reason is that some of São Paulo’s schools are run by the state and some by the municipality. In contrast, Rio’s are all run by the municipality, meaning a good idea can be put into practice everywhere. Right now, Rio is trying out lots of them.

It has set a single curriculum in all of its schools, and all teachers now test their pupils every two months to see if they are keeping on track. “Teachers weren’t really resistant to the new curriculum,” says Claudia Costin, the city’s education secretary. “We built it together, and teachers piloted and evaluated it.” She has also guaranteed teachers a week’s training each year. For the last two years it has been about what Brazilians callrealfabetização—teaching children to read when they didn’t learn the first time round.

Ms Costin’s most important innovation may be performance-related pay. If schools meet their yearly targets—which take into account past performance, and so are not unfair to those with weaker student intakes—teachers are given an extra month’s pay. In “Schools of Tomorrow”, as 151 of those in very poor, violent parts of Rio have been named, the bonus is 50% bigger. “Whenever we have a bit of extra money it goes to Schools of Tomorrow first,” says Ms Costin. “When other schools just got t-shirts, they got complete uniforms; we gave them copybooks first.”

In São Paulo, by contrast, the state governor bowed to pressure from teachers’ unions earlier this year and abolished performance-related pay in the schools it runs. “It’s a mistake,” says Ms Costin. “[Performance-related pay] isn’t the only factor that encourages learning, but it is important.”

I recently visited a School of Tomorrow called Escola Municipal Professor Afonso Várzea. It is located in Complexo do Alemão, a group of favelas (slums) in Rio that was the focus of attention worldwide last November, when the army went into it with tanksto support special forces in flushing out the drug dealers that used to run it. The school was a peaceful, cheerful, well-equipped place, with a good library, specialist provision for children with learning difficulties and excellent acoustics (an under-rated aspect of school design; every school I visited in São Paulo was a concrete echo chamber.) When I asked the head teacher, Eliane Saback Sampaio, her opinion of Ms Costin, she laughed and called her a “slave-driver”—before going on to talk of her with affection and admiration.

To appreciate just how important such progress is, you need to understand just how bad education in Brazil still is, despite recent big improvements. Barbara Bruns, a researcher at the World Bank who has been following education in Brazil for a long time now, recently co-wrote a book on the subject, called “ Achieving World Class Education in Brazil: The Next Agenda”. Check out “Box 3: ‘Basic Numeracy as Measured on PISA’”, on page 27. It gives a “Level 1” mathematics question—meaning one that is presented in a familiar context, is clearly defined, and requires only the need to understand a simple text and to link the explicitly-presented information to a basic calculation. This particular question was used in the PISA tests in 2006, and across the OECD 80% of 15-year-olds got it right. In Brazil, only 11% did.

Now imagine you are an employer looking to hire in Brazil. Almost nine-tenths of young people will be unable to answer this extremely simple question—and the generation leaving school now is Brazil’s best educated in history. Then you will see why businesses in Brazil routinely rate getting qualified workers as one of their most serious problems—and why a city that gets its schools right is giving itself a priceless edge.